Occlumency
by carpetinflight
Summary: I can't read your mind, you know. A conversation between Harry and Ginny.


Harry stands in the doorway and watches her, the way her hair lights up in the faint glow from the window, the pale purple of her eyelids and the look of concentration on her face. In the flesh, she is different than the girl who has lived in his memories for the last year -- more real, more solid. He says nothing.

Ginny looks up and sees him standing there in the doorway. She blinks, but he doesn't disappear. Not just a figment of her imagination, then. She meets his eyes but he says nothing. She waits, but after a moment or two she's already impatient.

"I can't read your mind, you know."

Harry's brow creases. It takes him a moment to understand what she's said. Every part of his being for months on end has been focused on one goal and now that it's over he thinks maybe he has forgotten how to have a conversation about other things. He steps inside the room, but still doesn't answer her.

Her eyes follow him as he makes his way over to the bed and sits down. He opens his mouth to speak, but then he doesn't know what to say, so he closes it again. It seems like nothing he says can be up to this moment, to the importance it's gained in his mind over the last year.

She sits, watching him and waiting. She thought about the moment of their reunion so many times, about what he would say and do, how she would react. She tried not to think about it, not to daydream and wish and do all those stupid girly things, but she couldn't help it. She didn't want to be that girl who sits at home and dreams but it happened anyway, and she wonders if that says something about her life.

Harry clears his throat a little, and Ginny thinks that this must be the most awkward post-killing-of-evil-overlord reunion ever. Isn't there some sort of script to these things?

"I thought about you," he says finally. "I-- I missed you." Inwardly he curses himself. What a stupid thing to say. He had all this time and he never thought of anything to say to her. No, that's a lie. He thought of too much to say to her, too many words and emotions and possibilities. He can't say everything, so instead he just goes on sounding like an utter berk.

Ginny almost laughs. They really do need a script for this. There's no way they can say everything they mean, everything that's inside them without one.

"I missed you too," she says gently.

"You didn't have to wait for me," he says. He didn't really think she would. Ginny is beautiful, funny, good at Quidditch. She could have any guy at Hogwarts just by looking at him. Why would she want to wait for him? There's nothing that great about him anyway, nothing really worth waiting for.

She narrows her eyes. Is this a breakup speech? She's going to hex Harry's ears off if she waited all this time just for that.

It's never a good thing when she gets that look in her eyes, the same look she got right before she hexed Seamus and he got a black eye from his own bogeys. "But-- but I'm glad you did," he says hurriedly.

"I wanted to," she says simply. Then, "I missed you." This sounds to her own ears like one of the stupidest things she's ever said, so she tries to say something else. "Fleur made a pudding and it was completely terrible, I think she swapped the salt for the sugar or something, just disgusting, and you would have laughed so hard..."

That sounds stupid, too, so she lets it go, just stops talking in the middle of the sentence. She wonders, if they did have a script for this moment, what would it say? Would it tell her what Harry is thinking right now, what she herself is thinking? She's not even sure she knows right now.

He tries to think of all the things he saw this year, all the things that he wants to tell her. The house where his parents lived was small and there were flowers in front, a room for a baby. Recovering from attack by twenty dementors can take weeks, and sometimes he still wakes up shivering in the night. There is an ancient passageway into Hogwarts beneath the lake, and the merpeople have a sacred trust to guard it -- he talked to their Chief who told him about it in reverent tones. But somehow, he can't put those things into words, doesn't know how to relate them to her.

"I missed you too," he says. They've been talking for less than three minutes, and this is the fourth time one of them has said that. "I guess you're going away next," he says, gesturing to her open trunk, schoolbooks and robes spilling out of it.

"Yeah," she says. The last year of school doesn't seem as exciting now as it used to be. Harry won't be there. Then again, he wasn't there during her sixth year, either. She might even make Captain this year. "I'll have a Floo, though," she says. "We can talk."

"Yeah, okay," he agrees, trying hard not to worry about what he will say. He wants to never leave her again, just so they'll never have to repeat the agony of this conversation.


End file.
